Justice Antonin Scalia, author of the dissent in Thursday’s 6-3 King v. Burwell decision, did not hold back taking Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion to task for failing to follow the plain language of the law and the Constitution.

Scalia noted: “You would think the answer would be obvious — so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it.”

As reported by Western Journalism, President Barack Obama made a very similar statement a few weeks ago–from the entirely opposite perspective, however. Some felt the president was trying to pressure the court to decide his way when he said that the court’s decision is “not something that should be done based on a twisted interpretation of four words, and so I am optimistic that the Supreme Court will play it straight, when it comes to the interpretation. This should be an easy case. Frankly, it probably shouldn’t even have been taken up.”

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Justice Scalia believes the majority in fact did twist the meaning of the four words in question–“established by the State”–to get its desired outcome of upholding the payment of subsidies through the federal healthcare exchange.

“Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State,’” Scalia writes.

He continues: “Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.”

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Scalia offers that: “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare,” given the extraordinary measures taken by the high court on the law’s behalf.

[T]his Court’s two decisions on the Act–[upholding the constitutionality of the law and the payment of subsidies through the federal exchange]–will surely be remembered through the years … And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and it prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.

Appearing on Outnumbered, he took note that Justice Roberts, in both major Obamacare cases, “used novel arguments that were not even advanced in the briefs or the oral arguments before the court.”

In 2012’s Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, neither the government nor the petitioners argued the penalties created by the law were a tax; but Roberts wrote in his opinion that it was a tax–therefore, a power that Congress has under the Constitution.

In King v. Burwell, neither side argued that the language in the statute was “ambiguous”; but Roberts wrote that it was, finding it a case of “inartful drafting.”

Justice Scalia posits that even if Roberts is correct that Congress made a mistake, “This Court…has no free-floating power ‘to rescue Congress from its drafting errors.’”

He believes that “The Court’s decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the American people’s decision to give Congress ‘[a]ll legislative Powers’ enumerated in the Constitution. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them.”

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas joined Scalia in his dissent.